#119

One hundred and nineteen is a cool number. I don't have a lot of feelings about nineteen itself, but I like when eleven is smashed into anything anytime it happens. Also, one plus one plus nine is eleven. 

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Some facts are inherently pleasurable. Pythagorean facts, little truths so elegant as to invoke worship. As some historically significant physicists and mathematicians have put it, that pleasure in finding things out and grasping the connections is the pleasure of discerning the mind of God; one of the goads of the human being, the ecstasy of spirituality, this action the universe takes in coming to know itself. Uncovering the Secrets of the Old One, as Stuart A. Kauffman put it.

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Continuing from yesterday, one cannot deny the absolute truth of certain labels. "Identities". Roles we have no choice but to play, words we have no choice but to say. 

Freedom, by the way, is in no way compromised by these things that our agency cannot shift. One is not unfree merely because one cannot sprout wings and fly into the sky, for example. And it may be that we shall generate descendants, whether "artificial" or analog, who are able to do just that, not that it matters. At any rate, fixed conditions do not abrogate total freedom. I'll elaborate on that stance some other time; I have a different pointless point today.

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That I am a writer, that I am a man of some kind, that I am Catholic, that I am an American citizen, that I am an immigrant, that I am an English speaker and a Spanish speaker, that I posses a genetic map which to some worldviews renders me a "mongrel of the worst nightmare variety"*, that I got some mental health and activity quirks, that I am able-bodied and sighted and hearing, that I am a worker, all of these are facts I cannot deny and act as lenses through which I may be viewed and through which I have no choice but to view the world, unless I engage in acts of massive and useless self-denial.

Yeah, they're part of my identity, everyone has them. But a gem isn't its facets; facets are cut into gems by humans, just as identities are etched into you by the world. A gem, just as a human being, is in its material, its components, the arrangement of its atoms, its hardness, the colors at its heart.

Identity is the most outside part, the quickest and least descriptive shorthand. I try to dispense with it insofar as it is possible, but it is undeniable that the outside, being what is in the most constant with the world, will affect how the center holds and looks even to itself, how it is able to signify and codify according to the world. The race thing, my god! An emerald is green and a sapphire is blue and a ruby is red. I got news for you: they are the same stone. But they're not! But they are.

What is meant when it is said that we are made in God's own image is not that we are monkeys that stand upright, which really is a very fundamentally stupid fucking read. To imagine that God put the asshole in just because "he" has one too is simply concussed. 

We are God because God is the paradox. God is the universe unfolding and watching the universe unfold from the lowest to the highest, from the incomprehensible micro to beyond the Void. Our atoms are a part of that unfolding, our cells, our tissues, our bodies and spirits and the ideas we generate and the things that we make, from the greatest to the least.

Alpha and Omega. One over infinity and infinity over one.

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So when I admit to these labels, it essential to qualify that I see these things in my own way and have drawn my own conclusions, because I make a conscious efforts to feel my own feelings about them, and no one else's.

Because honestly, I have no use for solidarity. Seems to me a parasite-concept, something manipulative individuals use to steal people's life energy and choices and even get them killed for a liar's cause.

There is little I appreciate less than when I hear someone invoking something that I am, like, say, "The Latino or Hispanic vote" or the incredibly nefarious "People of Color",  or the by now truly nauseating "the 'LGBTQI+/-' community", and ascribing to in any monolithic characteristics or boiling it all down to a sound bite to win an argument or justify bullshit. 

Nope. Nope. Only way is to do my own thing with what I got, with what I'm given. To do my own work my own way. I don't march, I avoid rallies, I don't go to Mass, I don't go to meetings, I don't hold up signs. I do not accept umbrella thinking, I refuse all implicit and tacit agreement with "my own". Extrapolation that I am on anyone's--anyone's--side is irresponsible and always incorrect. I own only myself, and no one owns me. I am not on anybody's side. Don't care how good it sounds, how much you cry about it or try to make me seem like the devil's own turdpolisher. I don't endorse. I keep the distance I need to survive.

Even if I like everything a person makes, even if I gush about their accomplishments and pay them compliments, it's just human recognition. I harbor no illusions that their capacity to generate beautiful and necessary work that I appreciate and have sustained myself with makes them "good" people; I myself am a high-level wretch and have known too many other artists too well. There are only people. I appreciate, I agree, but even when I cry "Yes! Perfect!"  I mean only for me, and what I am crying about in that moment, and not for everyone. I do not aggrandize, or engage in idol worship; I do not endorse. I eat what I need to in order to survive.

Should anyone suggest that instead of surviving you ought to give your life to or for a cause, or that the only way to survive is to follow where they lead, or invoke a need to act as they say on behalf an agglomerate of humans, for concepts they say are justice or peace or goodness or right--causes, selves, and ideas they are, of course, selling--just, please. 

Think twice. More, if you have to. Don't ever let anyone tell you that there isn't time to think things through. Don't die for a liar. Don't live under shadows.

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In short, way too much fucked up nonsense gone down because of people all getting together under a banner, and I don't play that shit.


--JL

*read this about myself on the internet when I was twelve years old. It was kind of funny back then, then for a while it wasn't, now it's pretty funny again. I take that pleasure and pride in it which I suspect is reserved specifically for mongrels and especially immigrant mongrels, as it is born of the acceptance of a very particular perspective. Neither fish nor fowl nor good whatever the hell, you hear some stuff you weren't meant to hear and some stuff you can't believe you have to hear again. All such a bad, bad joke. 

Anyway, my miscegenation is the bomb and I am the glorious future and the hope of this timeline, fight me